Metro-North to install new safety system

Saturday

NEW YORK – Metro-North Railroad will begin installing and testing the first elements of a federally mandated system that is expected to reduce collisions, derailments and injuries, this spring.

The railroad’s ability to advance the project, known as positive train control, or PTC, got a boost last month when the Federal Communications Commission gave it temporary access to the necessary bandwidth in its east-of-Hudson service territory. A permanent license for the radio spectrum remains an obstacle.

However, Thomas Prendergast, chairman of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, said last week that neither Metro-North nor the Long Island Rail Road will meet the federal deadline of Dec. 31.

The railroads now estimate their joint $1 billion project will be completed in 2017, at least a year ahead of their original schedule – assuming Metro-North can acquire a FCC license. The LIRR already has all the spectrum its needs, but licenses are a bugaboo for railroads across the country.

The hardware and software systems are being designed and developed by Bombardier Transportation/Siemens Rail Automation; they will be installed by Metro-North and LIRR employees.

“We want to demonstrate we’re working as hard as we can and as quickly as we can (before asking for a waiver of the deadline),’’ Prendergast said.

Prendergast said the rail industry as a whole may ask the Federal Railroad Administration for a collective waiver, since only a handful of the 42 railroads subject to the mandate will have PTC in place before Dec. 31.

The industry, which has to foot the bill itself, has pegged the still-evolving cost in excess of $10 billion.

Congress directed the railroads to install PTC in 2008, following a collision between a passenger train and a freight train in California that killed 25 people.

The still-immature technology, on the National Transportation Safety Board’s wish list since 1990, is aimed at preventing train-to-train collisions, over-speed derailments and injuries to railroad employees from unauthorized trains in work zones.

In its investigations of multiple Metro-North accidents in 2013-14, the NTSB suggested that PTC could have made a difference.

The Hudson Line train that derailed Dec. 1, 2013, for example, was found to be traveling at 82 mph as it entered a 30 mph curve at Spuyten Duyvil. The derailment resulted in the death of four passengers, including a Newburgh woman, and injuries to 63 others.

The train’s cab car only had a so-called “dead man’s pedal,” rather than a more sensitive “alerter,’’ to monitor the engineer, who was later found to have been asleep at the controls with an undiagnosed sleep disorder. The pedal responds to foot pressure while the alerter responds to inactivity, emitting noises and applying the brakes if engineers are unresponsive for brief periods.

Metro-North subsequently replaced its remaining pedals with alerters on roughly one-third of its fleet - all older equipment that is scheduled to be phased out.

Now, PTC will supplement alerters on the two railroads’ fleets. The system relies on a wireless network of transponders and antennas placed along tracks and under trains to continuously feed information to computers on the trains themselves and in operations centers.

The information, about the train’s location, direction and speed, then serves to automatically control train movements – slowing one train, for example, if it is suddenly too close to another train that the engineer may not be able to see.

Metro-North and the LIRR, like NJ Transit, Amtrak and the region’s freight railroads, are developing compatible systems since they share tracks throughout the Northeast and have to stay abreast of each other’s movements.

“We’re on schedule and on budget,’’ said Patrick Nowakowski, the president of the LIRR, which is overseeing the joint project.

But Nowakowski and Prendergast said the MTA has encountered another snag, in its plan to secure a long-term, low-interest loan from the Federal Railroad Administration to reduce its borrowing costs for PTC.

The loan program has a “Buy America” provision, and the PTC program, also overseen by the FRA, only has a percentage requirement for domestic components – a conflict the MTA didn’t discover until after it had awarded a contract according to PTC rules.

On this, Nowakowski said, the MTA isn’t waiting to seek a waiver.

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